Welcome back to the Path Went Chile. From part two of our three part
series of episodes about the disappearance of Melanie Flynn. Robin, do you want
to catch everyone up on what we were discussing last week? Well, Melanie
Flynn was twenty four years ago old. She hailed from a prominent family in
Lexican, Kentucky. Her father had been a state senator, and in January
of nineteen seventy seven, she left her job. She told her family she
was going to be home for dinner, but she never arrived, and shortly
after they would find her abandoned car at an apartment complex where she had once
lived, but there was no trace of her anywhere, so they reported her
missing and a police officer from the Lexington PD went down to Florida and checked
in on some sightings that Melanie had a legend Leaven seen in a local hotel,
and apparently the witnesses provided so many specific details about this woman that the
detective was certain that she was actually Melanie and closed the investigation. He was
certain that she had run off on her own and was alive somewhere, even
though he never actually found this woman and confirmed she actually was Melanie but of
course this scenario got to destroyed a few weeks later when they found Melanie's purse
and the Kentucky River not far from where she originally disappeared, So of course
this poked a major hole in the theory that she had taken off voluntarily and
gone back to Florida. And it wasn't long before a local narcotics cop named
Bill Canan claimed that Melanie had worked for him once as a drug informant after
she was busted for marijuanica possession, and started pushing forward to scenario that she
ran off because she was fearful of being labeled as a snitch. Of course,
this took her family by surprise, and of course a lot of people
all assume that Melanie was actually involved in a relationship with Bill Knan, but
he denied this because it turned out he was actually married to another woman.
And there was another guy on the narcotic squad named True Thornton who was also
rumored to possibly be dating Melanie, but after he resigned from the Lexington PD,
he got involved in major drug trafficking for an organization known as the Company
that would fly in large quantities of cocaine and marijuana from Colombia into the United
States. And at the end of our last episode we recounted a crazy incident
from nineteen eighty five where Thornton was being pursued by the authorities while bringing a
large shipment of cocaine into the US. So he attempted to parachute out with
eighty pounds of cocaine trapped to his body, but the parachute do an open,
so he was killed in a fatal free fall and crashed into a driving
way of a residence in Tennessee. And of course this is when we concluded
the episode of the story of the Infamous Cocaine Bear, because Shorton had dropped
part of his coucation and into a national forest and a bear just happened to
come across it and sampled the product and died of a fatal overdose. So
the bear would eventually be stuffed by a taxidermist and immortalized, and he's currently
on display under the nickname Pablo Escobar. But now we're going to get back
into the illogical part of this story and start talking more about Melanie Flynn.
This case is so frustrating because you have this young girl who has a really
close relationship with her family, and she goes missing, and a detective actually
makes a trip down to Florida, comes back and reports it. He's not
just convinced, but he's closing the case because he believes so deeply that Melanie
is alive based on these conversations he's had with quote eyewitnesses. I don't know
how much I actually believe he did much of an investigation down in Florida,
but I find it very difficult to say without her picture, with out an
idea, without someone having an actual connection to Melanie, that you would close
the case back off of it some maybe, but they closed it. And
then we start to learn that two detectives that Melanie had a relationship with are
kind of involved in this scam. Right they're fired from their jobs. They
run a major cocaine ring, or at least one of them does. And
so that starts to raise a lot of hair on the back of my neck.
That says, what happened to Melanie? She had this connection with people
who thought they were above the law to do drugs, you know, to
do drugs and deal drugs. Did they think they were also above the law
and could kill Melanie? That's certainly what it sounds like, doesn't it.
I mean, I don't have a lot of faith in the fact that somebody
like Thornton and Canan are the types of people who would be averse to doing
that, because we know absolutely that somebody like Thornton, who's supposed to be
upholding the letter of the law, leaves law enforcements you become like a major
drug trafficker. I mean, you think that there would be the ethical implications
there, But he's very easily crossing this line into criminality, and it looks
like there's a possibility that Canan was too, So I wouldn't think it would
be the most bizarre thing if these two had conspired and they were responsible for
what happened to Melanie anyway. In our last episode, we discussed a book
that reporters Sally Denton published in nineteen eighty nine titled The blue Grass Conspiracy,
An Inside Story of power, greed, drugs and Murder. The book covered
the rampant corruption which took place in Kentucky during the nineteen eighties, involving a
multimillion dollar drug smuggling ring called The Company who brought large quantities of cocaine and
marijuana from Columbia into the United States. The blue Grass Conspiracy spent a couple
of chapters focusing on Melanie Flint's disappearance under possible connections to the company. The
case would return to the spotlight in April of nineteen ninety three, when Bill
Canan was arrested on a series of federal charges, including possession of cocaine with
the intent to sell, intimidating witnesses, carrying a fake badge to identify himself
as a federal drug officer, and other various firearm charges. At Canan's Federal
Attention hearing, a former Lexington police officer named George Umstad, who was serving
a thirty six months sentence on a federal drug conviction, testified that in nineteen
eighty four, Drew Thornton had told him that Canan killed Melanie Flynn quote because
he loved her. Umstead also claimed that following the publication of the Bluegrass Conspiracy,
he personally asked Canan if he killed Melanie, and Canan just sort of
smiled, shook his head and nodded as if to say yes. The hearing
would also feature testimony from an FBI agent who described his interactions with a woman
named Bonnie Kelly, who was currently serving a life sentence for the murder of
Eugene Barry, a Florida state attorney that had been investigating the company. According
to the agent, Kelly had once told him that she overheard a conversation between
Canaan and Thornton in which they referred to Melanie's disappearance and stated that, quote,
they would never find her, all right, So y'all help me with
this? Umstead is a basically becomes a jailhouse informat I think so, yeah,
Because he was already in prison on other federal drug charges, and here
he is coming out of nowhere to say that he had heard Canan and Thornton
make these incriminating remarks about Melanie. Now, he would have a potential to
have heard that because he was a Lexington police officer. But do we know
if he was getting any kind of special deals? Was he getting an offer
by coming forward with this information? Because I'm always very leary about someone who's
currently serving time and shows up in the courtroom test fine against somebody, not
that I can see. I mean, he was only serving thirty six months,
which is three years, which really isn't all that much for like a
drug charge. So I think he really just came forward because he wanted to
share this story because he wasn't going to have to do that much time in
jail anyway. I'm sure it made him very popular. Police officers are always
popular in prison. And then when you also snitch on top of that,
that's exactly what I'm seeking, Jules. It was like, three years is
a hell of a long time for anyone, much less if you're a law
enforcement agent. But now you're also a snitch. So it's like Nike,
So yeah, um said, it's not doing himself any favors. But then
you also have this FBI agent, and are you telling me she's also in
prison. I'm not the FBI agent, the woman named Bonnie Kelly. The
FBI agent was the person who worked on the case and helped to put her
in prison. Okay, okay, okay, okay. I was going,
my god, there's now an FBI agent in prison too now, But okay,
So so this FBI agent actually comes forward and she's able to give information
as well, saying that Listen, I've overheard these conversations and it's very very
disturbing. Because you do have the law enforcement agent who's serving time, which
again I'm a little questionable about. But then you also have this testimony that's
that confirms they'll never find her, right, this idea that yes, we
killed her, and not only did we kill her, we dispose of her
in a way that no one will ever find her. So the day after
Kennan's attention hearing, the Lexington Police Chief Larry Walsh appeared as a guest on
a local morning radio show and stated that the department were working on Melanie's case,
but everyone was taken by complete surprise when Melanie's mother, Ella Ritchie,
planned made an unexpected phone call to the show and spoke live on the air,
marking the first time she had spoken publicly about her daughter's case in sixteen
years. Ella said that her family had done their own independent investigation into Melanie's
disappearance and gave their records about the information they obtained to John Bizac. As
you recall, Bizac was the original lead detective on the case, and he
was the same person who claimed that Melanie was alive in Florida, but he
had since been promoted to captain. Ella complained that the Lexington PDE never did
anything with the new information they provided and later told her that the records had
been stolen. She found it surprising that Chief Walsh had public who has stated
that they were still working on the case, since the department had not made
any attempt to contact the Flynn family in years. I have so much respect
for Ella Richie Flynn, who literally calls up the radio show and says,
huh, oh, my gosh, that Chiva police is on there talking about
my daughter's case. And it's almost like this bold testimony of saying, like,
oh wow, is her case open? And the mom kind of unloads
this idea of like, listen, we called you with information. No one
has reached out to us. And I can feel her resentment and her anger
of saying, don't you dare publicly use us as a public relations stint to
say how hard worker you know, working you guys are, when no,
you have not taken care of our family or our daughter in any way.
I applaud her so very much, badass. I love that too, Like
she stays quiet for those sixteen years, but when they go and they take
it to that level, and it's like you see it with law enforcement a
lot of times you hear it from families where they go in front of the
camera and they say that they're doing all of this work on this case,
and the families like they have yet to reach out to us, they don't
answer our calls, but yet they're trying to see credit for all this work
that they've done, which they may or may not be doing in some of
those other cases. But it seems pretty clear here that they're not doing the
work that they're taking the credit for. Oh exactly. Like I have seen
this situation in a number of other cold cases where the victims family is not
being communicated with by law enforcement. But this might be the only time when
one of the victims families have managed to call a live show and chew up
the police cheap on the air. And I wish there was footage of this
on YouTube. I searched for it, but it would have been quite a
sight to see. So around this same time period, Ralph Frost also appeared
on a local TV show to express his belief that the investigation into Melanie's disappearance
was hamstrung because of fears about Bill Canan. I keep wanting to say,
Bill Clinton, I keep do you know because of the boys on the track.
I keep saying that, I'm like, it's Bill Clinton, Isn't it
believe Bill? About Bill Canand and Drew Thornton. Bill Canand was ultimately indicted
by a grand jury, and when he went on trial, he was convicted
on all charges against him. He received a sentence of seventeen years and eight
months in federal prison before he was paroled in September two thousand and eight.
In July twenty nineteen, the case made the news again when the Lexington PD
announced they were conducting a new search for Melanie's body by performing an excavation of
a former campground called Murphy's Landing, which is located in Mercer County along the
Kentucky River. The dig was set in motion when the authorities received information from
an elderly person who lived in another state well. This person's name has never
been disclosed publicly. He was described as being a key figure in the investigation
who specifically mentioned a septicle. This information would be corroborated when the Kentucky State
Police received a tip from another unnamed elderly man who was on his deathbed and
so reportedly mentioned a septic hole. So these would be men who were what
in their forties, you know, like when all this happened, so around
the same agency. These two detectives. Do we think that they could possibly
be law enforcement or do you think that they're simply two older men who had
information about the septic hole that caused you know, interest likes. Those are
two specific and two random of tips to not be related to each other.
But do we think they were law enforcement? I think there is a good
possibility. And we're going to mention that a few figures in this case would
wind up passing away in twenty twenty, And they mentioned that at least one
of these tipsters was on his deathbed. So they've never specifically like said who
these people were, but you can kind of make some guesses about who they
could have been. And I do think that they probably had key information about
this case, especially because they took the information pretty seriously, right, And
I think if it is an ex law enforcement agent and they're on their deathbed,
you might take it a little more seriously. I mean, death bed
confessions oftentimes they can be accurate, but we've seen plenty of times for people
on their deathbeds throughout misinformation or they continue to deny what they clearly have done.
So I don't think just because someone's on their death that it's always accurate.
But I do think that their information would have been strengthened if they were
law enforcement agents in the past. And just the fact that, like the
second tipster, like he probably wouldn't have had any knowledge that the first tipster
had already disclosed this detail about the septical So the fact that he said the
exact same thing, I'm sure made the police take them so seriously. And
sure enough, police did find a septic tank on the property during their search
that after draining its contents, they found nothing, and it cannot even be
established if the septic tank had been in operation during the time period Melanie went
missing. No evidence was found during the excavation, but it did prompt investigators
to reinterview Bill Canan, who continued to deny any involvement in Melanie's disappearance.
However, electing to police Lieutenant Albert Johnson would publicly state quote, we left
the interview believing that he did not know the location of her body. Well,
Kenned would not get the opportunity to provide any further information because on March
the eleven, the twenty twenty. He died at the age of seventy four.
Sadly, while both the Melanie's parents, Bobby and Ella Richie Flynn,
were still alive at the time my original Trail Went Cold episode came out,
they both passed away last year at the age of ninety five after seventy six
years of marriage. Bobby died on September the twenty second, two and twenty
two, while Ella died four months later on December of the twenty first.
So after more than four decades, there's still no conclusive answers about what actually
happened to Melanie Flynn. So I guess you could say the path went Chile.
That's incredibly heartbreaking. I mean, you have this couple who lives ninety
five years, which is this magical celebration together, right, but they also
had as part of the key part of their marriage that their baby went missing,
and they were never able to get answers. And in this case,
one of the really traumatic things is that there are like almost every decade,
there's this new kind of investigation and new energy towards the case. As as
needed as that is and as much as a parent would be begging for attention.
In this case, those lulls and then these really high levels of attention
would cause so much trauma within their family, within their marriage. I just
can't imagine living this life of looking at your husband every night and saying,
I wonder where she is, Like I wonder what happened to her? And
that was a question every single day they woke up with. It's heartbreaking,
and you know I was, I don't know, I just lost for words
of like what kind of experience this poor little family had, where they worked
so hard, they served their state, They were a really great family,
and no one seemed to really pay Melanie much attention. One bright spot I
think is it least they had each other almost right up until the end.
I think that it's sweet and like heartwarming in a way that they passed within
four months of each other. But the darker side is what you just said,
Ash, that they never knew what happened to Melanie, and they never
got to see justice in her case, and they never got to bury her
body or to cremate her body, whatever they would have chosen to do.
That right was taken from them by whomever killed her. And that is just
so sad. But it is unique because often in these cases we see family
members and parents of individuals that are either missing or deceased and it's unsolved,
and the family tends to die at these premature ages. Here we see advanced
ages of ninety five. So I really hope that they got to have some
joy in their lives in their older years. Oh yeah, like they Looking
at their obituaries, it sounded like they lived pretty incredible lives. They were
very well liked by everyone in the community, and of course seventy six years
of marriage. It was pretty incredible that not only would their marriage last that
long, but they would both lived to very old ages and die around the
same time. So it is a shame that they led these great lives but
had to have this black mark of having their daughter go missing and not getting
inclusive answers about what happened. I mean, you can only imagine like twenty
nineteen when they were searching through the septic tanks on the property, like they
were still alive at that point, and I wonder if they were thinking to
themselves, oh, maybe we will finally still get answers about Melanie and get
a remains while we're still alive. But once again it went nowhere, and
it's pretty heartbreaking to think that they had to live that long without finding out
the truth. To either of you think of this is possible that Melanie's body
was in that septic tank and then maybe, like Canan or Thornton decided that,
hey, maybe too many people know about this, or maybe putting a
body in a septic tank isn't the smartest thing, so maybe we'd better move
her to another location. Yeah, it's certainly possible because obviously, like if
we have these tipsters coming forward to mention this detail, that means a lot
of people knew she was buried there, so they may have gotten to the
point that, oh, we better move her because one of these days someone
might rat on Stella romil and these remains are so it would not surprise me
if they had been there at some point. Do you, either of you
have any experience with septic tanks? No, last time I worked on a
septic tank. No. I was just about to ask, like, is
there any way that her body could have been? Like? Do they empty
these and her body could have been just sledged off with other stuff? Is
there chemicals that went in there that could have eaten away part of her body.
I mean, like, is that possible. I don't know. I
don't know what they put in septic tanks, but it smells like straight poo.
I remember when I went to My only experience with septic tanks is I
went to Promises in Malibu for rehab and they had a septic system. Like
in Malibu and California, they have septic tanks in a lot of places.
And this was like nine years ago, so maybe that's changed, but it
was vile, Like let me tell you, waking up every day to the
smell of septic it was just so awful, Like if anyone's ever got on
a houseboat and after like those four days and it's like the feces has been
collecting. That's what it's like. But there's people that come in the empty
these septic tanks. It doesn't just like stay forever. It needs to be
empty. So the idea that there'd be a body left in there doesn't seem
like the best place because potentially those chemicals could have eaten away her body or
they could have preserved it. I don't know. Yeah, And like I
said, we couldn't even be certain if the septic tank was around in that
location in nineteen seventy seven, So they're not sure yet if it's any relevance
to the case. So when I put together my original episode for the trail
would call two and a half years ago, one of the biggest challenges was
that the disappearance of Melanie Flynn was ultimately just the tip of the iceberg and
the Mammoth's true crime story known as the Bluegrass Conspiracy. We've already made multiple
references to the book by Sally Denton and how she pretty much uses Melanie's disappearance
as the opening hook during her first few chapters before she starts delving into the
massive conspiracies involving drug smuggling and the organization as the Company. Since a lot
of this activity took place years after Melanie went missing, we don't want to
get too bogged down in this material because you could probably do a long form,
multi episode podcast to share the entire story of the Bluegrass Conspiracy. It's
similar to our lengthy series on The Boys on the Tracks, where there was
just so much side material involving conspiracy theories and drug trafficking that we had to
figure out how much of this material was actually relevant to the featured case.
Well, the story of the Bluegrass Conspiracy is definitely relevant to Melanie's case since
she was known to be associated with a number of shady characters involved in this
conspiracy, and one of the most prominent theories is that she was murdered because
she knew too much. However, I should mention that even if it isn't
directly connected to Melanie's disappearance, I still had to share the story about the
infamous Cocaine Bear. And as a side note, at the time I recorded
My Trail Went Cold episode, they had not yet announced that a Cocaine Bear
movie was being made, so you could imagine my delight when I first heard
the was about it. Oh my gosh, I love your delight. Right,
this is like how fun. Ever, all of us who are listening
to this podcast or on this podcast, we like to use adjectives like you're
gonna love this case. It's super exciting. This is a fun one because
it's just the way our true crime minds work. But I'm beyond belief that
I have never heard of the Cocaine Bear, the Pablo Esca bear, if
you will, in this case. But Melanie is tied to that bear because
the detective, our former detective who then ran the company, he jumped out
of the plane with that cocaine on him. So it is not a far
fetch Like certain cases we talk about potential law enforcement conspiracies, but this one,
Melanie literally has a direct tie to two people doing prison time or who
are dead as a result of their criminal behavior as a law enforcement agents.
So it's shocking. He could have been her like ex lover, I mean,
not boyfriend, but if they went on a couple of dates. We
don't know if they established a physical relationship, but it did seem like they're
likely with something there. So if you've got essentially like an ex boyfriend or
love interest jumping out of this plane's who used to you know, be a
law enforcement officer and now he's running the company and is a drug trafficker and
he ends up, you know, deceased on somebody's driveway with a bunch of
cocaine pack to him, and you know, the rest that he dumped into
the forest ends up resulting in the death of this poor bear. So yeah,
I think that it is connected and it is important to talk about it
and it's like even though yeah, he had like such a karmic death,
like falling out of the plane and crashing because his parachute weren't open. I
guess the downside to it is that he may have been one of the people
who knew the truth about what happened to Melanie, but he's no longer around
to share it. I don't think he would have ever shared it anyways.
He doesn't really strike me as the type of guy that would have been forthcoming
with like the evil deeds that he's done. He just like stepped right into
drug trafficking with such ease. I mean he had to have been involved with
a company in some capacity prior to be able to just step in in like
a boss. Roll like what like he's like, hesse, that's it's crazy.
So here's a brief summary of how the drug smuggling organization known as The
Company worked. Drew Thornton was definitely the mastermind, but his closest partner was
Bradley Bryant, a long time friend of his whom he'd known since they served
together in the military. The other key figure was Henry Vance, another friend
of Thornton's who had worked with him on the Lexington Police Department's narcotic squad,
but while working for the Fayette County Sheriff's office, Vance lost his job after
he forged the sheriff's name on a purchase order for two dozen forty four Magnum
revolvers. In spite of this, Vance wound up getting a job with a
Kentucky state legislature and he even worked on the staff for Governor John Young Brown
Junior. Because he had a job on the inside. Vance's key role was
obtaining information about law enforcement's investigation into the company and feeding it to Thornton,
for which Vance received a large cut of the profits. We've previously mentioned how
Thornton was killed after a fatal free fall out of the plane. But Bradley
Bryant's drug smuggling career came to an end in nineteen eighty one when he was
arrested for attempting to sell a large quantity of marijuana to some undercover DA agents,
for which he received a fifteen year prison sentence. So we just keep
adding characters to this story. I mean, you have the company which Drew
Thornton was the head of. You have Bradley Bryant, who was in the
military with him. So someone else who you expect to have this moral compass,
Henry Vance, who also worked for the Lexington Police Department's narcotic squad and
despite having a criminal background, gets to work for the legislature and then become
an informant for the company. Like this sounds as if we're reading in some
crime fiction, white male privilege at its finest, Like this guy does the
worst crap and then he just basically gets promoted by getting this plum job somewhere
else where he's just spying for a drug organization like way to go? Like
what was the screening process where you hired him to work for the governor?
Like he had forged a sheriff's name, which is the type of offense that
should get you banned from public service, and then he gets a more high
profile job. Have you were raised? What were you doing with all of
those guns? Anyways? I know, yeah, we never found out the
backstory of that, But why do you need two dozen forty four magnums?
So as for Henry Vance, you might recall us mentioning that the Flynn family
had asked a Kentucky State Police investigator, need Ralph Ross, to reopen Melanie's
case. Ross eventually lost his job thereafter setting up an illegal wire tap on
someone, and that person just happened to be Henry Vance. You might remember
us briefly mentioning a woman named Bonnie Kelly, who is currently serving a life
sentence for the murder of a Florida State attorney named Eugene Barry. What happened
is that Kelly's husband had recently been arrested, and since he was involved with
the company, Vance was fearful he was going to make a deal and share
everything he knew with the authorities. So this prompt Advance to hire Kelly to
assassinate Barry before this could happen. For his role in the crime, Vance
received a fifteen year present sentence for conspiracy to commit murder, though he would
be released after serving less than nine of those years for good behavior. But
here's an interesting piece of poetic justice. We already mentioned that Bill Kinand passed
away on March the eleventh, twenty twenty, but Henry Vance also wound up
dying only three years later on March the fourteenth, at the age of seventy
seven. While we don't sympathize with these individuals. The downside is that if
either of them had knowledge about what happened to Melanie, they both took that
secret to their grace. Unbelievable. We're gaining so many people involved at this
point that it's hard to keep track. But you know, Ross was fired
for you said, the wire tap on who Henry Vance, who was a
crop So it's like he was doing a wire tap on someone who worked for
the governor's office and was feeding intel to the company about the drug investigations.
So that's someone you want a wiretap. That's exactly right. But also I
find it very difficult that Ross gets fired from his job for this wire tap
and you have someone like Vance, who has repeatedly broken the law, is
directly tied to Melanie's disappearance, and has a lot of power. So was
Ross fired because Vance and Melanie's connection. So if you want an idea of
what the company was like, we'd recommend watching the twenty seventeen movie American Maid,
which started Tom Cruise as Barry Seal, a pilot who, much like
Drew Thorne, flew a large quantity of drugs from Columbia into the United States.
And Whiley's story is a completely separate one American Maid will give you an
idea of how rampant these drugs smuggling operations were during the nineteen eighties, and
the release of that film and Cocaine Bear show that there's obviously a demand for
these stories in Hollywood. Anyway, if you want more information about this topic
in general, I'd recommend reading The Bluegrass Conspiracy like Robin did. But for
now, we're going to put the rest of this episode's focus on Melanie Flynn.
Melanie was definitely an interesting individual, and even though it sounds like she
was capable of leading a pretty wild partying lifestyle at times, which could prove
problematic when you're the daughter of a former state senator, it sounds like she
always remained very close to her family and had no issues living with her parents
at age twenty four. At the time she went missing, Melanie was still
holding down a respectable job as a secretary, so I think her parents held
the attitude that she was a grown adult who was free to live her life
how she wanted. This probably explains why they were not overly concerned during the
first few days she was missing, even though Melanie had failed to show up
as promise for a family dinner. Those are the details that really bother me.
Melanie specifically told her dad, I'm going to my psychiatry appointment and then
I will be home for family dinner with the book of coaches that you needed
from me. And so for me, it's overwhelming to think that they wouldn't
go wait a minute, she gave us her word, and like they said
earlier, if she was going to travel, at least she would have checked
in with us. So I find it very difficult to say, hey,
Melanie doesn't show up. She also likely missed work and other things the next
couple of days, and then what is it. A couple of weeks later,
here's our purse that washes up, her cars found abandoned, And so
it's very clear within a couple of weeks Melanie did not voluntarily leave on her
own. But I think from that first night, her family, even though
they said it wouldn't have been crazy for her not to show up, surely
they thought she made a promise to us about tonight, And I feel like
she would have communicated any different plans with us if those were going to change,
because, as I mentioned it, if I've have you seen American Maid.
Yes, I have not. Do you remember that scene where Tom Cruise
crash lances playing in the suburban neighborhood and he's covered with cocaine and then climbs
out and asks a kid to borrow his bicycle so he can get away from
the police. Yes, I remember that. Yeah, I don't think that
really happened, but I think it was heavily inspired by Drew Thornton's death,
because even though his plane crashed into a forest and he crashed into a suburban
neighborhood while parachuting, I saw a lot of parallels between that scene and what
happened to Thornton. So I don't know if Jules and Ashley are baseball fans,
but I certainly am. So I was quite fascinating to look. I
was quite fascinated to learn that Melanie's brother, Doug Flynn, was a player
on the best team in the major leagues at that time. During the nineteen
seventies, the Cincinnati Reds were nicknamed the Big Red Machine. Had had so
much talent on their team that you can understand why Doug spent most of his
time on the bench as a backup utility in fielder, but Hey, he
got to be on the roster when they won two conceptetive World Series championships.
Dog was often interviewed abou sister's case and newspaper articles in nineteen seventy seven,
but you can tell that the ordeal had a negative effect on his baseball career,
as he did not play well that season. In fact, in June
of that year, Doug was one of four players traded from the Reds to
the New York Mets for one of the greatest pitchers of all time, Tom
Sieber. However, Dogs played with the Mets did improve, and he wound
up winning a Gold Glove Award for his outstanding play at second base during the
nineteen eighty season. Doug retired in nineteen eighty five after appearing in one three
hundred and eight major League games, and during the last decade he has worked
part time as a radio and television broadcaster with the Reds. But as much
as I'd like to keep talking about baseball, this is a true crime podcast,
So let's start talking about Melanie again. Okay, so I love baseball,
but I hate the Reds only because one of my exes loved the Reds,
and so now I root against them. Sorry Reds fans, but it's
like a pride I take. It's the only thing left to hold on too,
So I'm always like, oh, go anyone but the Reds. But
I grew up as a huge Braves fan like every other American kid, and
then started spacing out my favoritism of different teams. But there is nothing like
sitting at a live baseball game and enjoying the entire atmosphere. I think it's
one of the coolest experiences of all time. But yes, back to Melanie
Well, there have been reports that Melanie seemed more nervous than usual prior to
her disappearance. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. On the actual day she
went missing, Melanie told her parents that she was planning to join them at
home for dinner after seeing her psychiatrist, but since she never showed up in
her appointment, it's obvious that something happened shortly after she drove away from her
workplace. We do have a couple of other eyewitness sightings of Melanie later that
day, which include her speaking with someone in a blue van at the intersection
just down the street from her office, as well as her being seen with
an unidentified man at a restaurant at night. I'm willing to chalk up the
restaurant fighting to mistaken identity, But if the fighting of her with the blue
van is accurate, I would be interested to know if the driver compelled her
to pull over and speak to them, and if that ultimately paved the way
for her disappearance. I'm more likely to believe that intersections stop with that blue
van, because remember, it's on the same street where she worked. The
diner not so much. She told Dad, I'll be home for dinner.
Why would she end up in this diner. I think the more probable one
is that stopped car, where she might have been talking to someone in that
van. I've been trying to find out. I have no indication if Bill
Canann or Drew Thornton ever drove a blue van or had access to a blue
van during that time period. But if this is a case where someone is
stocky Melanie, they probably thought, well, this is where she worked,
this is the usual time she gets off, so they very well could have
been waiting for her on that street and then pull over, and that's when
she may have been abducted or something happened that led to her disappearance. I
bet those two, with all their sketchy connections, had access to a van,
but I doubt we would ever be able to like concretely find that detail
out. Yeah, I mean, for Abab, we know they could have
just borrowed it from an informant or something like that, and they had no
ties to them. So from what I've heard, the one consistent thing about
Melanie is that she had a particularly close relationship with her mother, so it
would have been very out of character for her not to show up for a
family dinner without at least calling. Yes, Melanie did have a wild side.
It would often take off and travel throughout the country, but she would
still always make sure to phone her mother to let her know where she was.
This is why, even though there were reported sightings to suggest that Melanie
traveled down to Florida, her family did not believe she would have done so
without contacting them. Indeed, even if those sightings were accurate, it's unclear
how Melanie would have made the trip to Florida to begin with, since her
abandoned car was found in the parking lot of an apartment complex and a rather
rough part of Lexington. Since some of the witnesses in Daytona Beach reported seeing
Melanie in then he have some female friends. Then yes, theoretically she could
have gotten a ride with someone. But what detail which does not make sense
is that Melanie's leather jacket was left behind in her vehicle, even though the
weather in Lexington was incredibly cold at the time she went missing. She also
left a prepack suitcase of clothes in her car, as well as all of
her personal possessions at home, and since she never touched her bank account,
it's never been explained how she managed to travel to Daytona Beach and spend three
months in a hotel with nothing more than twelve dollars in her pocket. She
didn't know, he didn't. You know, I feel so sorry for the
family because throughout this, you know, you've mentioned things like, well,
they said maybe it was amnesia, they said maybe she did go on this
trip. But I feel like the reason that would enter someone's mind because then
that provides hope that she's still alive, right that if this, then there's
still hope that we can get her back. It's very very clear she didn't
call when she left her jacket. When her purse washes up when that car
is abandoned and there's really no communication with anybody. That Melanie ran into somebody,
whether she knew them or not, and everything went awry. Because to
me, there's just no chance that Melanie would blatantly tell her dad I'll be
home with information you need from me tonight, telling her southern mother I'm coming
home for dinner, which is a big no note to miss that, and
then never communicating again. I just I don't think it's a possibility. One
detail Robin and I find curious, and we think you will too, Ash
is how Melanie's car was left at an apartment complex which Melanie had lived in
years earlier, even though she had no real connection to the location by nineteen
seventy seven. This is a bit reminiscent of the case Robin Wentz covered on
the Trail Went Cold about the unsolved two thousand disappearance of Joey Lynn off It,
whose abandoned car was also found in the parking lot of an apartments where
she'd once lived years earlier. In both these cases, you get the impression
that the car may have been planted at their respective locations by someone who had
knowledge of the victim's past and wanted to give off the false impression. Did
the victim park the vehicle there themselves. The eventual discovery of Melanie's purse in
the Kentucky River makes it even more difficult to believe that she took off voluntarily.
Even if Melanie didn't want the purse, it makes no sense for her
to throw away the antihistory and she was taking no way. She had two
prescription pills in that purse and so she needed those on a at least a
routine basis. No way she would throw the purse with those pills away.
And I do really find it interesting this location where she used to live,
at this apartment complex where her car was abandoned, but there's no link to
any current residence there. I initially leaned towards is this a high drug area
where they were going to dump her car? But then you told me her
keys weren't inside, which means no way. If rims are trying to dump
a car in a high crime spot, they'll do so with the keys in
the ignition so that someone will steal it. Take it. Apart all of
those things here, it seems like they very purposely, like you said,
went hey, Melanie's story includes his apartment complex. It would make sense for
her to be here and they dumped the car. I don't know the exact
timeline of when Melanie was living there, but I hide it interesting that she
first got involved with Bill Canan and supposedly in late nineteen seventy four or early
nineteen seventy five, and it's possible that she was living there during that time
period. So it's like if she had any meetings with Canan get togethers at
the apartment, then he would have had knowledge that she lived there and probably
had this idea, Hey, if we want to abandon her car, just
leave it at this place where she used to live in order to throw off
the investigation. That sounds like the mentality of something a corrupt cop would do.
It's not very smart though, It's like she had a connection to it
so many years ago. What was she just going back there and like reminiscing
and dropping off her car and then taking off of her own accord, we'll
throwing her purse in the river. Like even if you want to get rid
of your purse, you would give it to somebody else and give it to
a second hand shop A friend. What woman walks up to a river and
it's like, I'm sick of this purse and all my prescriptions, Let me
toss it in the river. None. None, I mean, it would
have made more sense to just leave the purse in the car and make it
look like she left it behind there. But it's like, oh, she's
going to abandon a car and then make a special trip to the Kentucky River
a couple miles out of town just to toss her person's side doesn't make any
sense. So now I think would be a good time to bring an end
to Part two, and next week we're going to discuss the troubling investigation into
the sightings of Melanie in Daytona Beach. Join us again next week for the
concluding chapter of our three part series about the disappearance of Melanie Flynn. Robin,
do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold
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jul Kaylor than be sure to join Tier three. So I want to let
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